It Could Happen HereRobert gives an update on protest disruptions, Gare reports on Biden’s somber DNC speech, and Sophie attends a Palestinian Human Rights panel.
Also media, Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about how to pronounce the vice president and maybe future president's name, which is Kamala. See, I got it, Sophie.
Yeah, but you looked at me for reassurance.
No, I looked at you to be like, look at me. I'm doing it. I'm riding a bike with no training wheels. Garrison, how's uh, how's grinder going?
It's okay. I mean it's certainly better than the r n C.
Yeah, but it's it's still slow picking because I mean to find better.
Have you have you run into He lives in the South side of Chicago, a guy named six Garrison. So this is day two, ladies call him treat.
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
I'm Garrison Davis.
We are here with Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans's and I guess let's pick up right where we left off yesterday, because we're recording this Tuesday morning. Yesterday we had a full day of protests. There's still some protests today that that will get to later. But we were also able to spend a decent bit of time in the actual d and C last night, and I think me and Sophie will have certainly much to say about that, But I'm gonna throw it to Robert Evans because Robert Evans went back to protests after our dinner, and how was that it was?
You know, by the time I got back, the police had mostly knocked everything apart. There was a brief attempt to occupy the park after we left. So right after we left there was a scuffle over the fence and some people managed to reach it, largely due to the fact that the kind of fences that they use that they put up outside of events like this are all the same. It's the same tile of fence they had up in Portland, and if you remember the fighting over the fence in Portland, part of why there was days of fighting is because it was a pretty short section of fence, they were able to have it reinforced very heavily. Here, it was kind of more of a visual barrier than an actual physical barrier because they just there was two There's probably miles of cumulative fencing, and they don't have it all reinforced enough, so when a crowd got close enough, it was surprisingly easy for them to push their way in. Three people. I think got arrested at the fence breach. I've heard some folks say it was partly because press crowding in made it impossible for people to get away from the cops. Just given the way the rest of the day worked and what I've seen, I think that's pretty credible. It was one of those things where on the ground, if you were just kind of looking at tweets, I think it would it would look like it had been a larger part of what happened that day than it was, because it really was a few minutes and then things calmed down relatively quickly. But it did have an impact on the actual DNC itself, like if you're looking at the protests outside over Gaza. As part of their goal to being to disrupt the DNC, they succeeded in doing that because once there was a breach in the perimeter, the Secret Service has and I don't know what these are, but they certainly do have like a checklist of like, these are the things we do if there was a breach, And one of the things that we know they did and after that breach is they shut down all of the other multiple entrances for media and delegates and attendees into the event and funneled everyone through one entrance, which caused a clusterfuck for every massive bottom line.
I was gonna say, they sure did.
They sure did.
Me and Sophy spent quite a while trying to get into the DNC after this, because yes, all of the entrances on the northeast and west side of the convention all got shut down. Everyone was funneled into one entrance on the south side. The line to get in was just just crazy. It was so so large.
I would have to say again if you're looking at the goal of these movements as like causing embarrassment and disruption to the DNC, because fucking up entrance to the DNC fuck stuff up. For all of the influencers and media people trying to get in, I saw more anger over how fucked up getting in last night was than anything that had happened. Yeah, like in terms of like formative social media anger than anything that had actually happened in the streets. So I would have to call that a pretty good win for the protest.
I ever heard numerous DNC goers wearing their their best their best merch complaining that it was the protester's fault, Yeah, that the lines were so long.
Well, I mean people were also complaining about just like the level of like the DNC's like organization and like out because it was a mix. It was because of this, you know, triggered by actions via protesters, but also because of how the DNC was handling everything. It was a compounding, a compounding nightmare for many people. Yeah, and I mean in terms of other like other disruptions. We heard from a woman who's staying at our same hotel that she left at four pm to get to the DNC. She left on like one of the DNC shuttles, and it took her four hours to get in now. And part of what happened was that if she left on the DNC shuttle at around four, she probably got to the area around four forty five, just because you know, there's slow it's traffic.
No no, no, no, no no no.
And what happened next is that around four point fifty is when the is when the fence got breached, and then everyone getting off the shuttles could not what happened, they did like this like a mini security lockdown. Everyone was just told they have to stay in the shuttle. She had to stay sitting in the shuttle for an extra forty five minutes. She could not exit because they were not letting people get off the shuttles as as the fence was breached. So like, it's it's stuff like that that creates like these like compounding fractures.
And this is probably if something similar were to happen tonight, and the protests, as far as I know, are not planned to be in the same kind of locations as they were, so I don't think that's likely. I don't think it would have a severe response because a big part of what was going on Monday is that both the president and vice president were in the same building, so everything that normally exists in terms of security at an event like this was taken up to the suitcase that ends the world was in the venue, right, so everything was on and like just escalated to the m degree, which is why never take the fucking buses. It's long been one of my rules.
Yeah. My take is she left a four pm. She didn't get in until about eight pm.
Not worth it.
Yeah, I would rather die that. I would rather die.
It sounds like a episode of Black Mirror.
Uh huh. Really, it's terrible so I got back to the protest a little later. My understanding sounds like between seven and nine arrests over the course of the day. There were had been like three at the fence breach. There were three or four more when people tried to briefly set up an encampment that really did not last very long. Was very quick to take that down, and it was the I had been kind of wondering, and I still think we might see some mace tonight, but it didn't. Despite like the kind of Chicago's sixty eight tear gas stories that people keep talking about, that did not seem likely at all.
DR No, Yeah, and I've heard from ultiple people on the ground that it's it seems like shock. REPDI is very aware of the optics. Yes, And you know, despite being like the police they are, they are trying to not immediately bring out the truncheons on everyone's heads.
Now they do have the truncheons on.
They've all got and they've got they have the they have the worn ass old wooden ones.
They do have them.
But they are they are trying to be as hands off physically as they can. Of course, like relying on the amount of like internal peace policing from these which is big or mass groups.
But the other thing that they have going for them is when they do have to get go hands on, there are so many of them that they do not need to use crowd control well, crowd control weapons are things police use when they are out number. That's partly why Portland police are so nuts with it is because there's almost no police in Portland, like it is literally the least police city per capita in the country pretty much, whereas you know Chicago. I think the protesters outnumbered the police yesterday, but not by a lot, Like it was not an overwhelming amount.
There is a few differences between you know this and the RNC, obviously, and one of the main ones is that most of the cops we have seen have been local.
They have been Chicago PD.
There's been some Illinois State troopers of course, there's like Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations FBI, but mostly it is just Chicago PUD, even around the.
Premier CPD and Illinois State Illinois State. Yeah, based on how because I had been I had been reading updates for the last couple of weeks on how security plans were proceeding for the DNC. I think that part of what we've seen, a large part was influenced by the guy that police murdered in Milwaukee, because it was a couple of days after the RNC that I started seeing the first articles about how there would not be out of state police doing patrolling around the city of Chicago. So it does seem like, thankfully somebody over here recognized that, like, oh you if we have a bunch of fucking Ohio cops wandering around downtown Chicago like they're going to murder somebody, like they're going to freak out because these hay seed hicks have heard nothing in their entire lives as much as how dangerous Chicago is, They're just going to start blasting. Yeah, And I guess I'm just glad that hopefully nobody gets murdered by the cops this this week.
Well, do you know what we can't get murdered by?
Yes, Garrison, Wow, Yes, indeed.
Services. That's the fourth podcast. If you enjoy them too much, you know, too much of a good thing is bad. That's what I've heard.
Yeah, I mean, that's really why I'm not sure.
If you don't overdose on products.
Meet with bad bad le Roy Brown because he's got a custom Continental, he's got an Elorado. To Sophie, I'm a trend center. Nobody was talking about bad bad Le Roy Brown except for the one guy who very famously talked about bad bad Le Roy Brown.
Welcome back to It could happen here.
So after getting through that cluster a security entrance, me and Zobe did eventually make it inside the DNC, which we'll talk about in a sec But as me and Robert we were parading around the protests on Monday, Sophie Lichterman was infiltrating dem Palooza.
Which is the wrong way. It should be Demapalooza.
It should be dema Palooza, but it's not. Sophie the angriest.
Let me just give you some visuals here. First of all, you're absolutely cracked. The name is embarrassing, and that's generally how I felt about Dempaluza. What is dem Paluzaalza is like a.
First off, only the gen X people are going to remember Lollapalooza.
No chapel Roone just performed at Lollapalooza.
That doesn't see you, do you?
I don't some.
Kind of horse great keep going, keeping Jesus Christ.
Anyways, it was like half trade show, half panels by people talking about things that they think that the DNC crowd will care about too hard on the memes, like a there was a booth.
Was it the Coconut Vibes booth.
It was the almost thought that was a bored apes thing at first, they just they just.
I was like, why why are we acknowledging?
Fine, it's fine.
There was there was like cool Coconut Vibes here booth, and right behind it was a seated area with like probably like one hundred chairs and there were two people giving speeches on something and there were two people in the crowd. Many many such cases, such cases, and you know, there was a lot of cardboard cutouts with VP Harris's face on it. There was like a VP Harris as Wonder Woman section, and then there was a section.
With shirts They're all having fun.
Just so that people have an under understanding of like the level of embarrassing. There was a one booth while I was waiting in the very unorganized line to get into the panels area of Dempalooza that had shirts for sale for twenty eight dollars featuring one that said beware of the uptidy.
What does that mean?
Up tight white people? I'm guessing.
Okay, I believe, I believe so.
But also why twenty eight dollars band dictionaries at your own pearl? Oh god, okay, make stupid embarrassing again.
You get the picture. You get it, all right, you get the picture. So what panels did you attend at dem Palusa?
The first panel I went to was a panel that was like, how to talk to your relatives about Project twenty twenty five.
A great Thanksgiving dinner talk.
Yeah, And it was very unorganized and so I was thirty minutes late getting into it because not a single volunteer had been trained on how to get people into panels, and they had a circuit around the building several times until I found a very nice security guard who actually worked for the building that was like you go that way, thank you, sir. And I walk into this panel. There are seats for maybe three hundred people. There is one man at the front of the stage and about fifteen people listening. And I sat there for about five minutes and got up because it was basically the sum of it was if your your relatives that you disagree with are trying to tell you something. Don't yell at them, listen to them first, which is not terrible to sue.
Look, if your relatives want to start talking politics at the dinner table this year, this is going to be terrible. Handgun, drop it on the table and then just sit down, put your legs up, stare at them. Just like the post the exact, I learned everything about negotiations from the Portland Police Union.
This is interesting though, SOVID because every night at the DNC they're going to be reading from Project twenty twenty five on the main stage. Yesterday they were reading about all of the plans within that document to basically make Trump a de facto dictator. Tonight they're going to be reading on sections about how Project twenty five will affect the economy and your pocketbook. So they had this plan to every night actually talk about and read from the actual document. You know, framing this says like this is basically like try plan for once he gets into office, or this is like Republicans plan for Trump once he gets into office, and you know, this type of like scaremongering, fear rhetoric around what Trump would do was SEMy successful in twenty twenty, and I think they're trying to, you know, use this similarly.
Now.
I also think it's smart because there's two big threats here. One of them is does the election, you know, go badly for Trump, which is an open question, and then the other is if it does, he's not going to concede. Do the Republicans have shit together to actually steal the election, to do another Brooks Brothers riot, to refuse certification, to try and kick up enough uncertainty that they can take it to the Supreme Court for a steal. And the only way ultimately, if it's an narrow enough election that the Republicans go for that the only real way to fight back is to get an overwhelming number of people out and angry in the streets, like enough that it frightens you know, the Supreme Court and everyone else who would be required to actually put in like sweat equity to carry off that steel. And one of the ways you do that is by making the stakes really clear. And so I think this is it's a good idea and responsible that they're focusing on Project twenty twenty five as much as they are, and probably what's necessary to I'm hoping that the dims don't fold. If that happens, I guess we'll fucking see. You know, it's not two thousand.
Sob what was the second panel you went to at Dempaluzo.
So I walked around and looked into a bunch of different rooms to see if panels had a big crowd or not, and it was definitely or not. And then I went to the Voices for Justice, Democrats for Palestinian Human Rights panel that was.
Packed.
It sounded like the most popular panel of the day.
Packed, no seats available, standing room, and the energy was very respectful. Everyone in there was earnest excited that this was happening, but also it was mentioned many times that this was a step, but obviously not the step that they wanted. And it was filled with media but also just people that were there for Dempaluza wanting to hear what people had to say. It was a very diverse group of people and the panel featured you know, several activists, former members of the House of Representatives.
Someone from the Uncommitted Committee.
Yes, I believe they were part of organizing this panel. Although this panel was an official campaign approved panel, which was brought up many times by each person who spoke as a thing that it was a first of its kind approved campaign panel in regards to the people of Palestine.
And it's part of the dance the DNC has been trying to do where they it is such a popular issue like giving a shit about the genocide, wanting to cease fire, that they can't not signal to it. But also there's absolutely no willingness at the top to actually hold Israel accountable, so they like, they hold this event, they approve it, and it becomes the most popular one at the DNC. Biden makes a very mild line and support of like basically saying there was a line during speech last night that like the protesters outside of a point right, which is not taking meaningful action, but it is like it gets one of the largest reactions from the crowd that night. I mean, you guys were in the room, but at least from where I was watching at the bar, it sounded like a pretty sizable response. And that's I guess. The juggling act that they're still trying to do is like, can we continue not actually committing on anything while keeping some of these people happy.
And the uncommitted people are basically in this the protest group that's holding their votes, you know, hostage almost to say, like, if you want us to vote for you, Harris, you have to signal something, whether that be like an arms embargo, a real effort towards getting a ceasefire done, trying to lobby for change by using their vote as a bargaining chip.
Yeah, and a couple interesting things to note before I play an audio clip for the listeners here. It took almost the entire panel for them to mention Joe Biden by name. I think that only happened once. It was mostly just referring to the party itself. At one point a panel member thank to VP Harris, and she's trying. We need to hold her accountable, but give her a chance, which was the general energy from the entire entire group is like, she is not Joe Biden. We're hoping for better. Yeah, she's made an inch of a step. We need more, but we want to give her a chance to do that.
And I mean it's a really different vibe from a lot of the protests where you have people who are kind of more committed political radicals as opposed to the uncommitted folks. The overwhelming vibe is we would really like to get on board this, but you need to do something right.
The clip that I'm about to play for the listeners here comes from a doctor, doctor Tanya Haja San, who is a pediatric intensive care doctor who works with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, and she has spent the last decade as a medical trainer and helping people and organizations in Gaza in the West Bank. And she spoke for ten minutes, and I thought it was pretty moving. It was a large room and I was able to get very clear audio, which kind of says a lot about the crowd, and she kind of just spoke about her experience, and yeah, I guess I'll just play that clip for everyone now.
When the uncomituted Wan asked me to be here, I tested every doctor and surgeon.
That I knew who had been to Gaza in the.
Last ten months and asked them if they wanted to join me here in Chicago. And the overwhelming response, actually every single person said yes.
Let me see if I can switch out of my shift, And many.
Of them are actually here in Chicago right now because we cannot unsee what we witnessed and caused every single one of us. Many of us have worked in many wars before, and we have never seen anything so reachius, so atrocious, and that is why many of us swapped out of shifts have phown a very long way to speak to politic shies when we're not help ourself. As doctors were trained to protect and reserve.
Life, and this Israeli military.
Campaign that's targeting life and every thing even to sustain it has read through that impossible, and that is why so many of us have taken to other means of trying to protect life. For the past ten months, we have witnessed civilian massacre after civilian massacre, school massacres who internally displaced people with children, the flower massacre, massacres of people try.
To collect water, massacres of people.
Are collecting eight at eight sites, massacre after civilian massacre, Entire families exterminated in one single long humanitarians, healthcare workers killed at anjournalists killed at and record numbers pediatric amputations, amputations and children that are heartbreaking records over seventeen thousand children who have lost one or both parents Since October in in Gazala, we have treated so many children who have lost.
Their entire family that it has A term.
Has been coined to describe these children who probably heard it wounded child on surviving Family in WCNSF. This is a term that has been coined since October to describe as very frequent phenomenon that I personally waitnessed more times than I can count while I was.
There for children.
I have held the hand of children who are taking their last gasps because their entire family was killed in the same attack and couldn't be there holding their hand and.
Comforting them and could not bury them thereafter.
For the children who I treated who were discharged, they were and survived, they face a Russian let of a hundred ways that they will like me and pretend to die when they leave the hospital due to the circumstances. Is incompatible with life that has been architectured by its military assault, direct bombing, starvation, dehydration, diase alarming reports of the first cases of polio and gaza right now. Polio is a potentially deadly disease that crosses paralysis, including paralysis the muscles needed to breathe, that has been eradicated for decades in that region.
There's been a polio vaccination campaign that just essentially is eradicated.
The disease from the majority of the world, and now we're seeing cases emerging in a area of the world that cannot that has a healthy system that has been completely and entirely annihilated. I mentioned these wounded children with no surviving family. I'm going to give you two quick stories just so that you can humanize what I mean. We're gonna say this because I know it's really hard to hear these numbers and think about individuals and what this means to them. I received a young boy in the emergency department during one of the mass casualties who had hay from half of his face.
And an aclora.
The organs that are vited for breathing and blood supplied to the.
Brain were preserved.
They were visible, but preserved, and he was talking to us.
He couldn't see himself, so he didn't know what he looked like. At that Moore in time, he kept asking for his sister. His sister was in the bed next to him.
The majority of her body was burned beyond recognition. He didn't recognize that the girl in the bed next in his sister. His entire family, parents and the rest of his siblings were killed in the same attack. That always survived, and the next day I went to see him, a very young plastic surgeon, one of the few remaining plastic surgeons from Gaza, because both the others have either been killed or have fled. To understand, Pep had removed part of his chest and created a graft to cover those vibing the organs in the net. He was lying in his bed and mumbling, is so difficult to talk, And he kept saying I felt really close to him, and he said I wish I had died too. And I said what And he said, I think my entire family.
Has gone to heaven. Ever, it's not my entire coming is exact words or something effective. Everybody I loved is now in heaven. I don't want to be here anymore. That is one of so many stories.
Well, uh, yep, that's yeah. There's some ads, some ads.
Yeah, all right, we are back.
We're gonna close this episode by talking about means of these experiences in the actual DNC. Once we finally got past that ridiculous security gate. So we got in and the biggest thing that we realized first was just how disorganized. This was at least compared to the RNC. Now, this is due to number of factors, the protests being one. They're simply just more people at the DNC, like, way way more people.
Yeah, I definitely feel like one of the right wing things to do right now is to be like there was nobody there.
Absolutely not. It was packed.
It was way more crowded than Monday at the hour.
It was much harder to find a place to sit inside the arena.
Honestly hard to find a place to comfortably stand inside the arena. No, so unbelievably packed. Garrison and I got inside of the actual seating area trying to find a place to sit briefly as VP Harris came to greet the crowd, and it was roar y.
It was what I would describe as electric electric. People really like to see her. She played it very casual to kind of open up the convention. She didn't even have a podium. She was just basically a stand up set walking around with him.
She came out to be like hey girl.
Yeah exactly, and she was. She was opening things up very informally. People seem to really like that, and then you know, a lot of a lot of the main speakers started started to kind of roll out. Now me and Sophie were able to somehow get special tickets to go on the actual like delegate floor area, something we never were able to do during the R and C Dare I say big mistake, which was this was a massive error on our part.
This is why I just sat at the bar because it.
Is a nightmare down there, so much pushing, shoving, no place to go.
You really get to taste democracy.
As soon as we stepped on the floor AOC walked on stage, everything went crazy.
It was it was a nightmare called.
For ceasfire Gaza, which apparently I did not see any of the speeches before her, but apparently that was the first time that was done at night, and the crowd loved it.
She gave a great speech, mean speech, talking about working people.
I think it's also important because of just how well she was received and like the kind of the spot that she had at the convention.
Like she is she used to.
Be kind of be like an outsider to like the Democrat party right and at this point loved she is like fully within the fold of like the Democrat machine and for better or worse, to probably a mix of both.
In some regards, there's.
A lot of talk that in eight or twelve years she's going to be running and yeah.
Yeah, she she is preparing for a long political career. Yeah, and people seem to like her and the person that spoke immediately after AOC while while we while me and Sophie were still being shuffled around the show floor.
I don't think shuffled is the way to even describe it.
You guys have seen the Jordan Peele movie. Sorry, what's what's the one with the sky monster? Nope, nope. Yeah, it's like being it's being caught. It's like you're being sharned with a bunch of other people.
My hair, my hair was caught in like a CNN camera, like you could not breathe. It was like a mosh bit, but not fun.
No, we were we were caught inside the jean jacket. It was we were being slashed around.
There's three aisles and we were in the center aisle Jesus christtically like parallel to where the person who would be speaking comes up to talk.
And then Hillary Clinton took the stage and unfortunately the crowd loved it.
They went fairal for Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, baffling, just baffling.
It was.
I looked back at Garrison and I and we both with each other like death.
Wanted to die.
It's it's like when you're in a foreign country and they eat some sort of like lutfisk or something some sort of like weird rotten fish dish that they just love over there or okay, or.
When they eat like American garbage fast food and also love and you're like, oh no, it's a terrifying I don't know.
What I was expecting, but I just didn't think the DNC still loved Hillary the way they do. But they went fair.
She was like very popular. I mean, she won the primaries. She's got a base of support. She just is. The people who hate her hate her a lot. Excuse.
She gave a very big, mad speech.
She loss of arm waving.
People disagree about that. Garrison. People got angry at me for saying she seems angry.
She she was a little big man. I would I wouldn't say.
I would say she gave a standard Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, yeah, it was a pretty standard.
Yeah.
She's just not very likable and charismatic. So but she did.
I do I do have a great picture of wins Garrison and I survived the floor. We were up in a press area and of Hillary Clinton with both her hands in the air and the crowd eating it up.
Again a choice, Yeah, navigating this this whole place with an area We're never going to go in the on the delegate floor again, just a nightmare, thank you, being shuffled around corridors.
It's it's it's terrible.
There was a few other you know a few other speakers, uh Bashieri, I think did didn't okay speech, you know, uh, lot of stuff about abortion, A lot of videos on the big jumbo tron about about cop prosecutor Kamala taken down the felon Donald Trump as expected, they had they had.
Do we want to play a clip of that? By the way, do you have the Law and Order clip, Sophie Garson? Do I have the Law Quarter clip? Of course, I have the Law and.
Order kam and we can play twenty seconds of the Law and Order clip.
Yes. There was several different videos played throughout the night, but I would say the most memorable one was the Law and Order themed clip featuring Big Bad kam Law as the prosecutor and criminal Donald Trump as the villain of the story.
The New York sex pest criminal of the Week.
The criminal justice system the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups, the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. This is the story of Donald Trump. His entire life. Trump has believed he's above the law, that no one would ever dare hold them accountable. For the first time in history, we have a convicted felon running for president, and to take on this case, we need a president who has spent her life prosecuting perpetrators, like Donald Trump.
God damn it.
It was the choice and it was night one. We'll see how that plays.
So Jill Biden introduced well, first introduced her daughter, and then they introduced Joe Biden. I think one interesting thing is that throughout the night I started seeing more green Jill signs, which I thought was really confusing, like who's snuck in Jill Stein Green party.
Signs into this?
And then I realized, no, the signs for Jill Biden, which I don't know if they chose green signs to be intentionally like trying to like reclaim green for Jill Biden.
Instead of Jill Stein. I don't know. I found it to be odd.
She led the crowd and like we love Joe Chance And immediately as soon as everyone started changing like we love Joe, thank you Joe, it started to feel like we're kind of just sending him out to pasture.
And that was the main vibe of the Joe Biden.
He was very emotional.
Putting on his favorite Spotify up.
Yeah, he was very emotional, came out crying after his daughter introduced him. And I would say there was like a good ten minute standing ovation for.
Him, maybe five, but it was. It was long.
It was I was being generous. It's his last big thing.
I don't they It's a really nice farm. You know, there's a great view of the mountains from it. Beautiful upstasted run through in the summer all day long, Orgia. We just run it.
We had a direct view of the teleprompter. Did a great job reading that teleprompter. He won offscript, you know a handful of times.
But his actual performance was pretty good. Yeah, especially for coming out around like eleven pm.
He did.
He did pretty good.
It was a strong It was a strong performance for Joe.
One of the first things he mentioned was Charlottesville, as he talked about before in his campaign for being with the reason that he ran in twenty twenty, you know, talking about how, you know, lots of rhetoric was identical from Nazis and anti Semitic vile from the nineteen thirties. He had he had a line describing kind of the alt right movement as as old ghosts in new garments. I thought that was well written by whatever speech writer at the White House was putting that one together. Yeah, you know, talking about how Trump's being aligned with these like with this new version of the KKK, they just they just forgot to wear their hoods, talking about you know, very fine people on both sides. Hate has no safe harbor in America, all that kind of stuff. And you know, this was this rhetoric was a lot more common back in like, you know, twenty nineteen, you know, right after Charlotte's film, during like the height of like the alt right movement. We don't hear this as much anymore, but I think it is important to remember that this was not that long ago. He then kind of talked about mostly the past. He wasn't talking about kind of the future. He was talking about what the Biden administration has been able to do the past four years, and trying to tie in, you know, Kamula to all of the good things that have happened, you know, talking about four years of progress, you know, making waves with COVID, with the economy, lots of new jobs, Inflation is down at least now.
He gave his greatest shrinking the racial wealth gaps.
You know, health insurance stocks are good. We finally beat big Pharma, I'm sure whatever. A lot of stuff about tying him to the unions, you know, saying that Dan people have called him the most the most pro union president in history, and he's like, I'm proud to I'm proud to take on that Moniker or.
Something like that.
Union Joe Union Joe said he was the first president to walk the picket line. So you know, they were definitely focusing a lot of that union messaging. It is interesting considering that one union leader spoke at the RNC yeah, back when the nomination for the Democrats.
Speech is yes, yes, yes.
Very brief talk about carbon emissions and pollution, but similarly very little climate change stuff.
Almost yeah.
It's which is which has been common throughout this whole campaign, this, this, this, this whole election has been very little mention of climate change stuff.
You really get a feeling of what a gift it has been for the Democratic Party that the Republicans have given them all this fascism stuff to talk about, rather than actually needing to make any kind of serious statements about what they're going to do to be climate change.
Part of the other kind of achievements that he was, you know, Lotting was saying that they finally beat the NRA passing this gun safety bill, and next they're going to ban assault weapons and pass universal background safety bill.
Okay, it was one of the ones that didn't really do anything. Yeah, correct, Ye.
Yes.
There was a brief section about the border, saying that there is now fewer border crossings than when Trump left office, saying that, you know, Trump tried to kill our border security bill, and he said the main thing that makes us different from the Republicans is that we won't demonize immigrants.
We are going to.
They're going to still do really really bad like border violence and really really bad border.
Security policies from asylum from being able to like flee bad situations.
But they're not going to be spending the whole convention every single day, talking NonStop about how immigrants are coming to rape your family, and like, yeah, that is true, you don't talk about them the same way. But some of your actual policies are not all that different from what most Republicans in office want. You know, they're not calling for massive deportations at the same rate. But still, that border security bill was very similar to ones that Trump was proposing, and the only reason that Trump killed it was so that Biden wouldn't be able to take credit, which Biden didn't also say during the.
Speech order fear mongery. I mean, it's just been a titanic victory for the.
Right, and talk about abortion, talk about how if Harris's is president, she'll be able to sign in something that puts into law that right to abortion, saying that quote, MAGA found out the power of women in twenty twenty two, saying that they're going to find out again in twenty twenty four, which he's not wrong about, Dadley, that is that is repealing Roe v Wade did I did sign election results.
In twenty two, twenty twenty five, abortions mandatory finally.
And yeah, he's you know, talking about the quote we got to put a prosecutor in the oval office instead of a convicted Felon said, saying that Harris is going to be forty seven. And whenever he made a comment like that talking about how Harris is going to be the next president, the whole crowd sort of breaking own chance, saying thank you Joe, thank you Joe. It's just really funny because they are just thanking him for stepping down for the race.
Everybody wanted a chance to remember what two thousand and eight was like, and they got it, and they could not be more greatful.
And just just interesting to note that it took it did take him quite a while to really start talking about kamalaw but whenever the large chance of thank you Joe would start, he'd be like, no, no, no, thank you Kambola.
One of the last things that Joe talked about was briefly mentioning Ukraine and then talking about Gaza. And this is kind of one of the last things in his speech before he started like his closing remarks. You know, he talked about, you know, the need to get to get the hostages to safety and to quote unquote end of the war in Gaza, saying that they're working around the clock to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza and to get a lasting ceasefire. He then gave a small off the cuff mention to the DNC protests, and this part wasn't on the teleprompter. He said, quote, those protesters out in the street have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides. And he made similar comments to this last march, saying that protesters who were disrupting a rally of his quote unquote have a point. So he has used this line before, but this was kind of the only acknowledgment of the protests that I saw today from any of the DNC speeches. It is interesting that this was not scripted, was just something that he said.
Because as mentioned before, we had a view of the telerompter.
And at the same time that this happened, someone on the far side of the crowd unfurled a banner, and I think Robert has some more infro on that.
Yeah, there were a couple of delegates who managed to sneak in a banner.
Do you know if they were delegates? Well, at least one of them was Okay, a.
Banner that said stop arming Israel. They unfurled it and got a very strong and negative reaction from the people around them, some of whom were hitting them or at least shoving them. I think it kind of you could look at the video and use either term.
They were definitely like moving, like pushing.
They were definitely aggressively making contact with them.
With these like big wooden signs that people have not.
These thank you Joe signs, and then set up a chant of thank you Joe to kind of like drown them out as the people filming in the venue like cut the lights basically down to the lights in that area so that it would it would be less visible. Eventually they got the banner away from them, but it was one of those like it shows you kind of the hollowness of there's enough of a need that even Biden had to make a positive reference to the protesters. They see it as enough of a potential threat to, you know, being able to get the votes they need that they they have to signpost to it. But a banner, and this is not a radical banner. Stop arming Israel is not a radical stance down.
It's not calling an end to the state of events.
It wasn't an Intifada revolution banner right right. It was a literally just stop sending guns.
And stopped doing this to Israel that's being used to bomb them and people.
People were angry enough that I don't want to overstate the level of physical violence, but I don't want to understate that they were physically aggressive over this like to and and had this small group of people surrounded. And seeing that is a reminder that I am not in line with the people on the left who repeatedly call the DIMS fascist, because fascism means something, it's a real political things. Have plenty of authoritarians, and that's what that is. Is that is authoritarian thinking, and it can and will, if not checked, lead to a lot uglier shift than what we saw last night. So I did not like seeing that. It is a reminder that even as nice as the vibe shift has been, and I'm I'm not going to try to take enjoyment from that away from people, we are still in a real pickle as a country. Ari are acceptance of authoritarian aims and tactics.
And especially you know, sending twenty billion dollars in bombs.
And sending twenty billion dollars in bop, just send the tape, take all the Israel weapons and send them to the Ukrainians. That's that's my stance.
I'm sure Rudy Giuliani will love that.
Yeah so yeah, I mean you said that the crowd had a big reaction to some of the Palestine stuff, and at least from inside the convention certainly calls for ceasefire did that was big. When Biden made his little comment acknowledging the protests, the whole room kind of went silent, like everyone was kind of surprised. Like it was it was like a chill went over the air, like no one knew how to take it.
There.
There wasn't like massive cheers, there wasn't booze either, but like it was weird because like arguably Biden gave a more positive comment referring to the protests than most of like the regular like delegates and attendees. Most of the attendees we were standing around in the waiting line were much more like negative and dismissive. And I think I think Biden's comment kind of like took the wind out of the air, at least inside the convention arena. But that was basically the end of it. He gave, you know, closing closing remarks. Kamala went onto stage, They hugged, they did their little thing, and then me and Sophie went out of the convention as fast as we could, and we found this little corridor exit because we didn't want to mess with like the like with like the escalators or the elevator because that's always a nightmare. So we found this nice little staircase and I turned to the left walking down the stairs, and I saw two very large men in ryan gear with two assault weapons, and I said, I guess we're going that way.
Then I turned around and walk the other direction.
Honestly, funniest moment of the day.
We were like like ten feet away from these guys, away some of the giants, some of the most heavily armed men I've ever seen. I think we stumbled across because I looked at that signs later, I think with someone across the security gate for the presidential motor case. So that's that's where we almost accidentally went.
Yeah. No, those are guys who have spent every year of the last twenty years of their lives just planning to kill as many people as they care. The second someone takes them off the lad They.
Would shoot a twink on site.
They not care, they don't give you, they don't give a fuck who They shoot the instant they have a chance.
So me and so we left as soon as we could and went back to the hotel and immediately went to sleep.
And that was the first night at the DNC.
You had drinks with me, garas.
I did not.
We shared a special moment.
I'm trying to create a compelling narrative of the podcast.
Well, I thought it was compelling narrative that we had a nice drength was.
I said hi to you and then I went okay bye.
Yeah, I wasn't interested in you because you left.
Yeah, sorry, I abandoned you. I'm so sorry.
But that anyway, that was the first night at the dn Z. That was the first round of speeches. I believe tonight we're gonna split up. Somebody's going to go and then go over there and me and Robert are going to be back in the streets.
Yeah, I will report if anything of interest happens. It is the I believe Bill Clinton Obama night. Jess, It's once again the years twenty twenty four is the Bill Clinton Obama.
It would be pretty funny if Bill Clinton got played onto stage by bad Leroy Brown.
All right, this is it can happen here? You think it happened here? Recording from Chicago, Illinois.
We'll see you.
I do wouldn't walk.
All right, Jesus fuck.
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